Return to Cedar Hill

by Jacie Middlemann

  "Your husband is a sweetie and adores you."

  "Yes." Mary agreed with the security of a woman who knows the years amounted up to more than just time together. "Anyway, I got here, saw a bunch of places I didn't want then ended up at the Marshall Street house. I looked at it and then walked around the corner to the Cedar Street house with Pete almost running to catch up. Looked at it. Then I made my realtor a really happy man."

  "I bet." She looked at her cousin. "Did you dicker at all or just pay what everybody was asking?"

  Mary just laughed. It was such a Casey question. "I got a good deal on both. Pete wanted to make sure the deals went through on both sides so he made sure everybody got what they wanted out of it. Bottom line for me though was getting the houses. And I made sure he knew that. I may not have come to Burlington for the Marshall Street house but I couldn't have gotten one and not the other knowing both were for sale."

  "We both know where you are...or aren't when it comes to the Marshall Street house but what about Nanno's house, the Cedar Street house?" Casey knew she was pushing but needed to understand Mary's motivation. Maybe then she could figure out her own. "I know I keep asking but what are you going to do with it?"

  Mary thought about it. Casey wasn't the first to ask her, wouldn't be the last. And to be fair, she'd asked herself the same. Many times. Now she thought, maybe now she had the answer, simple as it was. "Live there." She smiled at her cousin who was as much friend and sister as she could ever hope for.

  "Sounds good," Casey said as she pondered it. Mary always tended to cut through the garbage to the heart of things. Maybe just living and letting things comes to you in their own time wasn't a bad thought. As ideas went it was doable. She sent her cousin a sly look. "Now all you have to figure out is what to do with the other one."

  Mary laughed, feeling just as she had hoped she would by coming here. "That's what you're going to work on," she said and enjoyed the look of fearful anticipation Casey couldn't hide.

  

  "Do you have any memory of where the light is? I remember a string hanging down from it but can't for the life of me remember where in the world the light was in the first place." Casey struggled not to sound frustrated for fear her cousin would head right back up the stairs. It had taken her the better part of the morning to cajole her into coming down here in the first place. She knew there wasn't a flashlight to be found in the house because she'd already looked. If they had to go back upstairs to find something to help them to see beyond the nose on their face it would take her that much longer to get her back down here again. And, Casey admitted to herself, as much as she wanted to check the basement out, she didn't have it in her to do it on her own.

  Mary chewed on her lip nervously. Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself against all the memories she kept way, way in the back of her mind and struggled instead to think back pragmatically, tried to remember the few times she'd been down here and desperately excited about it rather than the memory of that last time. She focused solely on Casey and where the ceiling lights had been. "It's somewhere along the stairway." She closed her eyes tight, going back in time, trying to remember. "They could reach it from where they were standing on the steps." Which is where they both still stood, standing midway down the stairs that led from the small mudroom to the dark basement. If there had ever been light from the little windows that ran along the foundation of the house they'd long been covered by brush or were simply dirty from decades of dirt and neglect. "But I can't remember exactly where."

  Casey thought about it. She had a vague, very vague memory of her father reaching up and turning on the light. She could even remember his heated whispers, probably cussing now that she was old enough to understand the male mind as much as one could, as he felt outward searching for whatever it was that switched on the light Just as they were now. "It's on the wall side...somewhere," she stated with the very limited amount of excitement plausible for anyone who found themselves standing on a stairway surrounded by pitch black darkness.

  She slowly made her way back up the steps and then retracing them began making her way back down again, all along the way feeling with her hand against the wall from the rickety wood that passed for a railing all the way up towards the ceiling as far as she could reach for anything that remotely resembled a light fixture. At the same time she took tremendous care not to accidentally stick her fingers into a fixture of any sort. She'd seen what electricity could do to the human body and fought back the shiver that ran through her body at that particular gruesome memory.

  "Be careful, Casey," Mary spoke softly almost as if she was reading her thoughts. "It might not even work anymore."

  "Just because you hate basements doesn't mean someone else hasn't been down here in the last thirty years." She felt something, waved her hand around in the air searching for the string that should go with it, assuming no one had changed the mechanism in those thirty years. "Bingo." With a quick prayer she pulled with care on the fraying cord. A pale yellow light lit up the stairway area and extended, just barely, into the area of the basement nearest to them. "We are in business," she declared trying for a tone of levity knowing this turn of events wasn't exactly up her cousin's alley. "I'm going to find the other lights and see if they work."

  Mary nodded in unnecessary acknowledgment, not at all particularly keen on moving from where she stood on the steps. She hated basements. She had always hated basements and this one in particular though even as she stood there quietly she knew this was something they needed to do. Were both in some way drawn down here in a way she simply didn't understand and wasn't prepared to question. Not yet. She let her thoughts drift instead to her husband. Daniel had spent a lot of time early in their marriage poking fun at her because of her steadfast determination not to buy a house with a basement. Despite all his teasing he'd never pushed it even though it would have provided needed extra living space for their growing family.

  For this moment though she simply studied the sizable area before her. Casey had found another light more toward the center of the basement so more of the room could be seen. There was stuff packed along the walls, mostly a scattering of boxes and old furniture. More stood haphazardly all over the middle of the large open room. There were no divisions in the big open space. No obvious ones.

  Still on the stairway Mary glanced over to the far wall that ran along the front of the house. Gauging the distance from where she was standing, she would bet it was almost in line with the front living room outer wall. There were crates and boxes almost completely covering the entire wall. She sat down on the step. She knew Casey's intent. Knew she was right. And knew she had allowed herself to put this off long enough. She was a grown woman...a mother...an author and fairly successful at both. And she was a little too old to have fears about facing the past. She sighed and laid her head down on her knees. She was being an idiot. She felt more than heard Casey walk over towards her then walk up the few steps to where she sat. Felt her squeeze in next to her on the old wooden step. And was eternally grateful for the hand that slid in and held onto hers.

  "I know it's hard," Casey thought back to her own memories of that night that she knew without a doubt Mary was dealing with as well. "I remember thinking, wow, Aunt Miri's going to deck him one." She squeezed the hand in hers. "Of course considering the child I was that would have been really impressive." She paused, looking for the right words, knowing that some things stayed with you long past the deed itself. And they could become so much bigger with time. "Looking back at it now, having been in a few relationships," she talked past the inelegant snort that came from her classy Audrey Hepburn style cousin. "Arguments happen," she continued carefully. "Even really heated arguments, especially when they are about important things and even more so when it's a really emotional time." She thought back to that night, what they had heard sitting huddled together unseen from their perch at the top of the steps. She thought too of what they'd heard later that night when they were thought to be
sound asleep. It had been emotional that was for certain. You couldn't get more emotional than grief.

  "It's probably easier for me," Casey continued to put voice to her thoughts slowly, thoughtfully. "They weren't my parents, they were yours. But I loved them Mary. Your mom and dad treated me like I was their own, just like mine treated you as if you were their second daughter. It hurt to see them argue like that, to hurt each other the way they did. But your Dad was a lot like mine, like most men are to be quite frank. They just don't get it. Even when they think they do they don't, not really. They see things so differently. Your Dad didn't see how much your Mom was hurting. He saw her as being unreasonable. He didn't see, didn't understand that to her a dining room table she sat at as a child as did her mother before her was a cherished family heirloom. To him it was just stuff...a tangible possession...something to find a place for." Casey stopped and listened to the quiet of the basement that held such a storm of memories. She knew too they were both quietly terrified of the disappointment they might soon face. She squeezed her cousin's hand. "Both your Mom and Dad were coming at the same thing from completely different directions and neither could find that place in the middle to agree."

  She stared hard at that far wall before continuing with what she had never told a single soul before this moment. "I snuck down here that next morning before anyone else was up. You were still asleep." She felt the movement beside her, knew she'd gotten Mary's complete attention with that little unexpected snippet. "A whole lot of it was gone, not all but most of it. There's just no way your Dad or mine, clueless that he always seemed to be, could have walked down here that morning and not have noticed something was amiss. They might have been clueless but they weren't blind. I kept waiting for someone to say something, to ask anything. But no one said a word, not a single word. Of course nobody was talking much to anybody else that morning so it's not like anyone would have noticed." She sighed wistfully. She remembered that day as if it had been yesterday. "Either they really didn't have a clue where it all went and didn't want to know...or," she tightly squeezed the hand still in hers, "maybe they knew exactly where it was. Maybe they were a part of it. But whatever went on nobody was talking about it."

  "They still had the junk man pick up everything else," Mary broke in softly.

  "Yeah, you're right, they did. But Mary, I was there, just like you and I don't think our mothers were nearly as upset about what was getting carted off as you might be remembering."

  Mary thought back. Her memories were clear as glass on so much of it but on other events as fuzzy as flavored seltzer water.

  Casey watched her face, saw the tentative consideration. "You heard the same thing I did when we were supposed to be sleeping that night. I think our moms took care of what was important. Whatever was left was because it wasn't. They certainly weren't concerned about what my Dad or yours were going to say. They were way beyond that." She thought back to the weeks of silence between her parents once they'd returned home from burying her grandmother and putting her house up for sale. "At that point I think it was all about the house." She turned to her cousin. "This house."

  "Mama was so hurt," Mary said as she sighed wistfully. "They all were." She took a deep breath as she fought against the pain the memories brought. "She didn't want to keep the house because she was being unreasonable, she wanted to keep it in the family because..." she fought back the tears that welled in her eyes. Tried again. "It was the place they could come back to and be together, just like they always had."

  "None of our fathers understood that," Casey said stating the obvious. Neither had her brothers for that matter.

  "Daniel does."

  "Your Daniel is a man among men." Casey treaded carefully. "It was a different time, Mary. You know that."

  "Mama always wanted to come back. I knew why. We never talked about it but I knew. I just didn't know how to help her. And by the time I could, by the time I really understood how important it was to her, she was sick and then she was gone."

  And there lied the crux of it thought Casey with certainty. "And so now you have. For her, for you, and Thank God, for me. And with some luck we'll find out for certain after all these years what all that noise was that we heard from our room." She patted her cousin's knee, stood and pulled her with her. "We're going to find that door," she walked over toward the wall both of them had spent the last minutes staring at. "And then we'll find out if anything is left of their efforts that night."

  "There might not be anything left. Someone else may have found it and sold it all off...or given it to the junkman." And wouldn't that be the height of irony, she thought.

  "Maybe," Casey allowed. "But we're not going to know until we haul all these boxes out of the way and see for ourselves." With a tingle of excitement brewing she rolled up her sleeves literally and figuratively and began doing just that. Within moments Mary followed...pushing, carrying, dragging, and whatever else it took to move away the barrier of boxes and everything else that had lined the wall. Once cleared away, they stood back.

  "I only saw Nanno open it once," Mary spoke softly. "She kept her canning jars in there."

  "Hum," Casey muttered. She was studying the upper edge of the wall. While all the other basement walls had been reinforced with cinder blocks at some point along the way, this was still the original structure, no cinder blocks, no cement, just lots of very old, aged wood. "She brought me down with her a couple of times. I loved it down here and would beg her to let me. For a kid it was like an obstacle course just getting over here." The basement had been filled to the brim, wall to wall and stacked high with the furniture from the Marshall Street house. Not just furniture, she corrected herself, treasures....family treasures.

  Casey began running her hands all along the wall. "It was towards the middle," she ran her hands in that area of the wall, not certain what she was looking for but knew just looking wasn't going to get them anywhere. "At least I think it was somewhere near the middle."

  "I remember Nanno telling me that when the house was built the room down here was closed off in case of bad storms though anywhere in the basement would have been safer than being upstairs." A sudden memory struck her out of nowhere. "She said she could get to it from her room and from outside if she needed to and time was short." Mary shook her head. "I think those are almost her exact words....if time was short."

  "The house was built in the late 1800s." Casey thought about the times, the deadly risks faced without today's early warning systems. "Tornadoes were a real threat and not just to property." She let her hand slowly slide over the wall focusing in one area right in front of her. "Especially back then, they didn't have the advance notice we do today. It wouldn't have been unusual for them not to know something was coming until it was practically on top of them."

  "And they would want other ways of getting to safety if time wasn't on their side." Mary looked up to the ceiling trying to gauge where her grandmother’s…now her room, was situated in perspective to the wall in front of them. She would swear that this wall lined up with the front wall in the living room. But not in the bedroom she realized. She pictured it in her head as it was from the outside. It extended a bit beyond the front living room wall. Then it hit her...the bedroom wall lined up with the outer edge of the front porch, not the living room wall. "I just had all the floors sanded and refinished and we didn't see anything that looked like a trapdoor coming down here or anywhere.

  "Could have been covered up somewhere along the way." Casey felt a bump and as she continued to move her hand up and down vertically realized that it was consistent and began to run her hand just to the side of it. She could almost swear she remembered her grandmother simply reaching out and opening the door. There were no acrobatics, no reaching up or down in any unusual way that would have caught the attention of her very young and imaginative mind. "Or it could be that there's a mechanism that you have to know exactly where it is." She battled down the excitement as she found a hole almost as big as a chi
ld's fist. "If Nanno kept her canning in there it would be a good place to keep all kinds of valuables as well. But you wouldn't want to advertise to the world though how to get in there. It would make sense to make it so you knew how to open the door, or where it was, only if you needed to. But not so that every other person knew it as well." She twisted her fingers around to move what felt like a latch on the other side of the hole. The wood in front of her shifted slightly and with a little push swung open. "Kind of like this." She couldn't help the huge smile that spread from one side of her face to the other.

  "Wow!" Mary just stood there. Not because of the door that had swung open or because of her cousin's ingenuity. She just stood there in absolute silent awe because of what she could see even from her position with only the little bit of light that had to be filtering in from the front porch floor slats. The room was packed. "Oh My God!" She walked slowly to the door's opening to stand beside her cousin whose smile of success had shifted to one of awe mirroring her own.

  "Casey," Mary whispered. It was the best she could do. For all that she had desperately wished for it, for as much she had feared it didn't exist except in her childhood memories, she had never allowed herself too much hope, terrified it would be dashed much as her mother's had.

  They stood there together quietly. Each absorbing the reality of what they were finally looking at. All those years ago lying in their beds...listening to the sounds of movement below them. In that moment not much had been said by some silent agreement between them, afraid even whispers could be overheard. That any little noise might interrupt...deter whatever was going on below them.